Author Description

Beginning with the first Persian Gulf conflict of 1990--91, the United States has been at war continuously for a quarter century. While using propaganda catchphrases, such as "defense of human rights" and "War onTerror," to conceal the real aims of its interventions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, as well as its confrontation with Russia and China, the United States has been engaged in a struggle for global hegemony. As the US seeks to counteract its economic weakness and worsening domestic social tensions, its relentless escalation of military operations threatens to erupt into a full-scale world war, between nuclear-armed states. The essays and lectures in this volume, informed by a Marxist understanding of the contradictions of American and world imperialism, analyze the progression of military interventions and geopolitical crises as they have developed over the past quarter century, not as a sequence of isolated episodes, but as moments in the unfolding of an interconnected historical process. -- Provided by publisher.